The American Board of Orthodontics (ABO) certifies orthodontists as board certified orthodontists. To be certified, an orthodontist must submit sets of before and after models of work performed by the orthodontist. A before model is a model of a patient's dentition before the orthodontist treated the patient and an after model is a model of the patient's dentition after the orthodontist treated the patient. The ABO uses the before and after models to determine whether the orthodontist successfully treated the patient. If the ABO determines that the orthodontist successfully treated the patient, the orthodontist is eligible to be certified.
The ABO requires that the cases submitted by an orthodontist must be sufficiently difficult to treat. In other words, the ABO does not want to certify an orthodontist who can only show that she or he can successfully treat easy cases. Accordingly, the ABO has developed a test for analyzing the difficulty of treating a case. The test involves analysis of several characteristics of a patient's dentition. These characteristics include overjet, overbite, openbite, crowding, occlusion, crossbite, and other patient characteristics. Currently, the ABO performs the test by physically measuring physical plaster models of a patient's dentition.
However, there are drawbacks associated with physically measuring physical plaster models. For example, physically measuring physical plaster models can be a time consuming process. Furthermore, physically measuring physical plaster models can introduce a certain amount of subjectivity to the measurements. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for methods and systems for performing the test that overcome the drawbacks of the prior art.